Women have been behind some of the greatest innovations in technology. WITI (Women in Technology International) is the premiere global organization empowering women in business and technology to achieve unimagined possibilities and transformation through technology, leadership and economic prosperity. WITI has powerful programs and partnerships that provide connections, resources, and opportunities. Since 1989, WITI has delivered value to individuals, small businesses, and corporations. www.witi.com. Build. Empower. Inspire.
The producers of Lunch at Piero’s celebrate women’s contribution to innovation by partnering with WITI and look forward to introducing the media to members of this important organization.
Anthony Verducci of Popular Science’s online Instructables.com has taken the VIA ARTiGO and breathed new life into a piece of technonostalgia that many of us still have in our attics, the Super Nintendo. (For you Millennials, the SNES was a much beloved 16-bit gaming system from the early 1990’s.) Anthony inserted the tiny ARTiGO into the Super Nintendo housing, having removed a few of the Nintendo bits and pieces with some Dremel tool deftness. He built in a DVD drive and gave it a slot for outside access, slapped a Nintendo emulator on it, gave it lights, power and voila, a PC that’s also a Super Nintendo that plays Xvid movies!
The VIA ARTiGO and of course the newest VIA Nano processor will be on display January 8 and 9 at Lunch@Piero’s, the working press and innovator lunch during CES in Las Vegas.
This past Saturday we attended BiztechDay 2008 in San Francisco, an outstanding confab of business experts, event planners, pro-bloggers, social media gurus and all manner of innovators. Highlighting the event was Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” — a must-read for people who want to make the best use of their time and the Internet to free themselves to build their business and pursue their passion. This day-long conference of Web 2.0 and social networking was filled with great information for branding, blogging, and podcasting.
But the real highlight and lesson in viral marketing happened when the afternoon kicked off with a keynote by George Wright, marketing director at Blendtec, a Utah blender company. Blendtec needed more branding…that is, until George discovered that Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson spent a fair bit of time in the company lab, delighting in shoving things into the Blendtec blenders to see what would happen. That was the start of www.willitblend.comand a series of videos that took a $50.00 investment in a URL and a bit of video editing time to reach more than 5 million views. Tom Dickson has blended alarm clocks, marbles, and even blended an iPhone and auctioned off the mangled remains to raise almost $1,000 for charity.
Total views of the “Will It Blend” videos? Over 100 million. Did it do anything for their business? You bet. Their crazy videos along with national media coverage increased their sales seven-fold with carryover from their consumer products to their professional line of blenders for bars and restaurants.
Now we pose the question: Will it Blend at the press lunch, Lunch@Piero’s during CES? Stay tuned.
Women have been behind some of the greatest innovations in technology. WITI (Women in Technology International) is the premiere global organization empowering women in business and technology to achieve unimagined possibilities and transformation through technology, leadership and economic prosperity. WITI has powerful programs and partnerships that provide connections, resources, and opportunities. Since 1989, WITI has delivered value to individuals, small businesses, and corporations. www.witi.com. Build. Empower. Inspire.